Alex Casey watches Wellmania, the new Netflix comedy starring Instagram sensation Celeste Barber.
The lowdown
Based on the book by journalist Brigid Delaney, Netflix comedy Wellmania follows successful yet shambolic Australian food writer Liv Bealey (Celeste Barber) as she embarks on a quest to get well as quickly as possible. After years of drugs, drinking and degustations in New York, her life choices come to a head in an extremely madcap situation involving a new TV job, a stolen green card and a friends 40th back in her hometown of Sydney. Through this consulate and cholesterol-based chaos, Liv finds herself unable to return to the Big Apple until she passes her medical.
The only solution? A crash course through the wellness industry to try and undo decades of damage in as little time as possible.
The hype around Wellmania is largely down to its star, comedian Celeste Barber. Rising to viral internet fame for parodying high fashion shoots and impossible celebrity outfits on Instagram, Barber’s ridiculously realistic recreations served as the perfect antidote to the filtered and Facetuned influencer facade of social media. In many ways, that makes her the perfect person to front a series that looks to pull the curtain back on one of the most aspirational and snake-oil laden industries around. But is Wellmania actually any good? And what is it really trying to say?
The good
If you are partial to physical pratfalls and prolonged periods of farting, this is the show for you. Celeste Barber quite literally throws herself into the role, hurtling through aerial silks at the gym, power-chucking during spin class and plodding begrudgingly down Bondi Beach in a quest to improve her health. At many points, her performance as Liv Bealey conjures a much darker and more vice-driven Miranda Hart – both protagonists stumble endlessly over both their feet and words, but Wellmania provides slightly more sex with strangers and bumps of cocaine.
What is surprising about Wellmania is how much more is happening in the show than just Liv’s comedic journey through the wellness world. While that alone is enough of a premise to get most people interested, there’s also a lot of other drama going on. Maybe too much? Her widowed mum is having an identity crisis in retirement, her brother is getting married, she’s falling for a celebrity chef and her best friend Amy is stuck in a sexless marriage. Plus, her boss is also demanding that she go viral, and there’s a constant cloud of some vague trauma from her past, possibly involving a dead dad.
Of all the additional storylines, it’s the relationship between Liv and straight-laced bestie Amy (played by New Zealand’s own JJ Fong) that proves the most fruitful. The pair have been friends since meeting at journalism school and have stayed close despite their life situations yawning apart. Reminiscent of the best conversations between Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph in Bridesmaids, their scenes are always the most revealing, interesting and funny parts of the show, negotiating the complexities of female friendships as life moves on and being an adult moves in.
The bad
Unfortunately, I am three episodes in and still left with one burning question – does Liv Bealey have any redeeming qualities at all? So far she’s shown herself to be extremely selfish, entitled, inconsiderate, rude and generally unpleasant, reminding me of this terrific piece about the growing tediousness of the Messy Millennial Woman trope on television. “Recently, MMW has started to migrate from a bracingly realistic proxy to something fast approaching a reductive stereotype, monopolising comic portrayals of the female experience,” writer Rachel Aroesti explains.
Referencing everyone from Fleabag to Hannah in Girls, Aroesti appears to have seen this backlash to the MMW coming a mile away. “She is ossifying into predictability, becoming the default, one-note expression of womanhood when the very point of her was to diversify the portrayal of female characters,” she writes. I understand the ongoing need for flawed and complex women on screen but, as an annoying, white, millennial writer, I can safely say that we do not need any more annoying, white, millennial writers on television.
Without the charismatic Celeste Barber at the helm, Wellmania would be far less watchable and its flaws far less forgiveable. For a show hyped around its skewering of the wellness industry, the colonic centres and cupping procedures actually form a pretty small part of the series, which crams in additional drama like a personal trainer making a superfood smoothie. Still, just like a superfood smoothie, there’s enough yummy berries to hide the yucky spinach, making the series an easily digestible chug with only the occasional weird aftertaste.
The verdict: Much more dramedy and much less wellness weirdness than billed, perhaps fitting for a show about an industry where nothing is actually as it seems.